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Intrigued, captured and moved - some favourite works
by Dr Carole Shepheard
May 2004
This is the start of a new series in NZArtMonthly, somewhat like desert island discs, but art works rather than music. I thought Dr Carole Shepheard was an apt person to kick this series off, she is an accomplished artist and teacher; was awarded her doctorate this year (Lieux de Memoire: the object, the artist and the museum) and has a CV that made my printer shudder - a full 24 pages of her academic records, scholarships, teaching experience, selected solo and group exhibitions, commissions, papers delivered at conferences, you name it, I think she was probably there.

So the premise of this series was very simple - to ask someone deeply entrenched in the arts about the works that had motivated; continued to provoke or inspire, or had even moved them to tears (something I read that art historians are loathe to do ...)
- Kim Ellis, Editor

This is Dr Carole Shepheard's response:

A work that intrigued me:
Meret Oppenheim
The Couple, 1956

While Surrealist Meret Oppenheim is possibly more well known for her fur cup, saucer and spoon (or being photographed by Man Ray!), it is this complex fetish work that I find fascinating and intriguing. The eroticism of a simple pair of women's boots, fused and parasitically growing together is both compelling and repugnant. Oppenheim made this work for the lobby outside the production of Picasso's play 'How to Catch Wishes by the Tail' and since seeing ths work in a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York, her influence on me and my thinking about intervention and culture has been profound.

twinshoes.jpg Meret Oppenheim
The Couple, 1956

A work that captured me:
Cornelia Parker
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991

She takes an ordinary garden shed and its contents and arranges for the British Army School of Ammunition to blow it up! This 'dramatic act of luxurious violence (Iwona Blazwick)' is Act One. Parker elicits the assistance of a range of performers for her work - sometimes highly trained professionals, other times serendipitous and random selections of individuals. In Act Two she suspends the charred, distorted and incinerated pieces into a magical installation that is lit with a single light bulb. The large and constantly moving shadows cast on the walls and the floor of the new Tate Gallery creates a cosmology that is both dramatic and poetic. See the explosion by visiting - tate.org.uk/colddarkmatter

A work that moved me:
Doris Salcedo
Unland: the Orphan's Tunic, 1997

Almost all the work of Doris Salcedo moves me to tears but none more than this which I saw at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. This artist has spent a great deal of time listening to the stories of people who have survived violence (domestic, gang, military) and she uses materials that ar markers of memory and signifiers of psychological pain and trauma. This chilling work, two wooden tables joined together has one half covered with an open weave cotton fabric from the dress of a six year old girl and hair, is about absence, death and the fragility of human life. A work such as this is about the seduction of the aesthetic just before plunging headlong into an abyss. It had a profound effect on me at the time and returns in order that such acts of violence must never be forgotten.

salcedo7.jpg Doris Salcedo
Unland: the Orphan's Tunic, 1997
salcedo4.jpg Doris Salcedo
Unland: the Orphan's Tunic, 1997 (detail)

I wish to thank Dr Shepheard for sharing these works with us. Visit this section in the June edition of NZArtMonthly to see what our next 'special guest' has to say about their 'desert island' must-sees.